Congressional Republicans who have been pushing legislation to require all presidential candidates to produce legitimate birth certificates say they wonder why President Obama took so long to respond to their demands.

The president today released his 1961 birth certificate in an attempt to calm a three-year-long controversy recently stirred up by New York developer Donald Trump, a possible 2012 GOP presidential candidate. He said our times are too serious for continued silliness.

But Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Tyler, one of the leaders of the birth-certificate movement in Congress, says that President Obama is the only one acting silly.

“It is truly distressing that the administration would wait so long to release such an important piece of documentation, when such a simple act was all it required,” he said this afternoon. “In my mind, a critically important action we could take in Congress is to eliminate similar controversies arising in future elections. Hopefully, all presidential candidates in future elections will avoid arrogant condescension and simply establish their qualification from the outset.”

Gohmert said he didn’t understand why Obama previously “failed to present his birth certificate for inspection.”

“In early 2008, the New York Times and the Washington Post had raised a question about John McCain’s eligibility since he was born in the Panama Canal Zone,” Gohmert said. “Others raised questions about President Obama’s eligibility. These two ‘birther’ controversies exposed a flaw in the enforcement mechanism of our Constitutional eligibility requirement for U.S. presidential candidates.”

Gohmert said the measure he sponsored “was not drafted to single out President Obama” and was “merely an enforcement mechanism for meeting the Constitutional requirements to run for this nation’s highest office.”

What do you think? Is this controversy much ado about nothing? Or does President Obama still have some serious questions to answer?